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Mesoamerican Painted Manuscripts at the Latin American Library

Description

The Latin American Library at Tulane University is home to one of the premier collections of original Mexican pictorial manuscripts found within the United States. These treasures, along with extensive holdings of rare books, other original manuscript collections, comprehensive holdings of facsimile editions of other codices, and other scholarly research materials and primary sources, distinguish it as one of the world’s foremost collections for the study of Mesoamerican writing systems and painted manuscripts, pre-Columbian culture, and early Colonial Mexican history and society.

The digital collection, Mesoamerican Painted Manuscripts at the Latin American Library, presents images of the Library’s holdings of original and rare copies of Mexican manuscripts painted in the native pictorial tradition. They are painted on a variety of materials such as animal hide, maguey, amate or fig bark paper, linen, and European paper; their content dates to the early contact period (A.D. 1500 to 1700). The texts collected here represent a variety of themes: Aztec history and migrations, land claims and grants, property holdings, census data, fiscal and tribute accounts, and royal Mixtec genealogies.

The early Contact period in Mexico was a time of rapid culture change, loss, and transformation during which much of pre-Columbian culture, particularly the arts, ideology, language, and religion, meshed with that of the Spanish colonists and the Roman Catholic clergy. The scribal tradition and writing systems of indigenous Mesoamerican civilizations also persisted and became amalgamated with the European scribal arts implanted along with the rest of Spanish colonial society.

Prior to contact, Mesoamerican scribes were highly skilled intellectuals, craftsmen, and priests, who were literate and likely multilingual. Examples of their work that have survived from this period show that they were very adept at learning new languages and scripts, writing conventions, and meeting the distinct demands of a Western colonial society for secular written documents. The painted manuscripts in the Latin American Library’s collection presented here in digital form represent important dimensions of this syncretic process.